16 febrero 2017

The verger's daughter sees that I still do not show enough enthusiasm. She says: "All the real skeletons are inside, you know. Every bit of every bone. But here are some bits left over which we could not put together and so they are here, on their own."

Another curtain is raised and I behold a handful of bones, in a glass case, bedded on red damask.

"And here," and she picks up a glass tube, "are the martyrs' teeth." So they are. Lots of teeth. She gives them a good shaking and rattles them up and down in their container as though she were mixing a cocktail.

I propose that we return to the Ducal Bar.

"Tired?"

"No," I say, "but I can do with a strong coffee."

We get an affectionate good-bye from the verger's daughter: "Ah, yes, our martyrs are lovely. Everybody who visits Sabbioneta goes away satisfied."

As far as I am concerned this is true. My desire for martyrs' teeth has been satisfied for life.

At the cafe the young girl steps behind the counter and continues polishing the glass where she left off. We have been away for about three hours.

I buy an illustrated paper in the main street, which is called, of course, Via Vespasiano, and go back to the inn and sit down with the roadmenders and drink some of their wine.

"Why did you come to Sabbioneta? Have you relatives living here?"

"No."

"Friends?"

"No."

"Why, then?"

I say: "To see the Gonzaga town."

"Ah, that."

They barely hide their contempt. I think I could still save my standing with them if I told them that I saw the martyrs' teeth. But I am too lazy.

I have now followed the entire track left by the Gonzaga and here, in Sabbioneta, I feel more than ever the insecurity of that age pressing all round me, squandering its riches, shedding its life blood, in an ever-renewed attempt to prove its power and its glory.

That they could not cope with life is certain. But, anxiety ridden though they were, I have no right to draw a parallel and to pretend that they were our psychological cousins just because we, too, feel insecure and afraid of life to-day.

Their attitude was quite different from ours. They protested against the shortness of human life and against the instability of all things by being as alive as they possibly could be. They ate sensations by the spoonful and turned themselves into a salad of all sorts of contradictory human qualities. Lots of instances are known about the men and women of the Renaissance where one and the same person could be cruel and kind, coarse and refined, wordly and other wordly in turn, to a degree which would be quite impossible to-day. Each man wanted to be himself and as different as could be from his fellows.

We to-day behave in the opposite manner. We imagine that the less different and the less conspicuous we are, the less we shall be noticed by the forces of life and the safer we shall be.

If I, now, sitting with the roadmenders, borrow from them a copy of the Mantua Mail, I shall find on page 2 the personal column written by "Mantua Maligner". I read:

"Duke Vespasiano (Goggles to his friends) Gonzaga tells me that he is going to spend the next fortnight quietly in his cottage on his estate in Sabbionetta. Vivacious dark-eyed daughter Elisabetta, who keeps house for him, prefers to live in the country because 'it is grand to put a new-laid egg on Daddy's breakfast-plate. Besides, being away from Court I find more time to iron Daddy's shirts.'"

Thus we are told that the great administrator has a funny nickname, just like an ordinary man. His staff of servants has been supressed for the readers' benefit, and we are made to believe that he is being looked after by his daughter, just like any other ordinary widower, that new-laid eggs are as much a treat to him as to ordinary people, and so on. Heaven forbid that anyone should get the impression that Vespasiano has a genius for statesmanship, that he lives in the luxury which he deserves, and that his recreational activities are beyond the pale of ordinary mortals. Virtues and vices alike have been compressed and ironed out. He is ordinary, after all, thank God, we say, and breathe more freely.

I walk past a leaning tower, turn into a side street, and arrive at a place called Regina. I enter one of those hotel dining-rooms which are utterly silent, though fully occupied. All the guests are travelling couples, French and Americans, in their fifties, and by the look of them they have been married so long that there is nothing left to talk about.

The women are grey-haired, well curled, with long ear-rings, uncrushable hats specially bought for travelling, and long, well-bred faces, like elderly greyhounds. The husbands are short, red-faced, and vulgar. Certainly a come-down. Why have all these women married beneath themselves?

The service is beautiful. I order tongue, green sauce, and spinach. The red wine, called San Giovannese, is better than the one in Mantua, wich was young and prickly. The bread is bad and varied in shape. My own particular roll at the moment looks as though three lobsters had a fight, ran off, and left their claws behind, all entwined.

The tongue arrives. The ox who carried it in his mouth must have been an anemic beast. The spinach tastes of soap. For a minute I waver between yellow kitchen soap, Oxydol and Persil. After a few more mouthfuls I award the palm to Persil. I order crème caramel. The Persil has got into that, too. This paragraph is not written as an advertisement for Persil and I was not offered any money for mentioning this product.

Vale, Regina, thou shall never see me again. I always had a dread of good honest soap and water.

On the next morning I take my breakfast in the main square. In order to understand the main square of an Italian town one must think of the town as a house, with a hall, kitchen, bedrooms, and drawing-room. The square is the drawing-room. All the activities which take place in the drawing-room are enacted in this square. Pleople dress up and go there to see and be seen. They meet their friends and flirt and gossip. They take refreshments and play cards. They stay for hours. The square is not a glorified street, it is a vast room, but instead of settees and chandeliers and vases and china figures, it is furnished with palaces, churches, clock towers, columns, and statues, and has the sky for ceiling. People enter and leave through narrow archways and openings in the arcades, as through dooors.

The finest drawing-room in Italy is the Piazza San Marco in Venice. It is the drawing-room of Europe.

Ravenna has a pretty little reception room, well furnished with a medieval palace, a Baroque palace or two, a church with a clock that lights up at night, arcades along two walls, and two Renaissance columns with saints on them. Behind their heads one can just see the tip of the leaning tower.

I refuse myself a second coffee and walk through mean little streets till I get to San Vitale. It is a red-brick basilica with bulging apses and some flying buttresses clad in ivy. It looks old and dirty and undistinguished, and could easily be taken for the annexe of a London hospital or railway station.

Inside it is one of the marvels of the world.

To start with, the stage management is wonderful. It is a round room. That is to say, when one steps inside it looks round, although it is really eight-sided, and when one looks again one is not sure any more that it is eight-sided and one looks up, for relief and to collect oneself. There are three rows of windows encircling the walls and instead of glass they have panes of dull gold alabaster, so that everything one sees is dipped into a cloud of golden light, but unevenly golden, because the alabaster is veined and streaked.

Then, as I walk into the choir, there is more gold and more and more. I move beneath a tempest of gold, I stand amidst golden showers. I pass from rains of gold, and cascades of gold, into torrents of gold, and slowly I perceive that there are people looking down on me, with only their heads visible, as though having parted golden curtains; that there are pillars dividing those draperies of gold, and that there are patterns weaving over the manifold arches, all bathed in the streaming shimmer of gold.

I realize that the whole choir is clad with mosaics and that this golden-rain effect has been achieved by putting the colours against a golden background and, according to how much gold there can be seen, the golden rain changes from drops to torrents. There are strange plants and animals which have grown in this golden climate. The pillars are crowned by baskets carved in openwork, like stony lace, and the small arches spanning them have grown chains of doves and fish-scales and peacock fans, and in the center of the ceiling there stands a white horse with a halo of gold.

Every one of this patterns has a meaning. The horse is Christ and the doves are the souls of the faithful. It is a religious shorthand written in mosaics on the walls.

Yet the dominating part is the people.

When I say people I do not mean only the heads of the Apostles which gaze down from the ribs of the arches—they play only the part of onlookers, like stage crowds. And I do not mean only the star performers, which is to say, the Emperor and his court on one side of the choir and the Empress and her ladies on the other side. I also mean Christ with the angels, who holds the centre. They are all human beings, exceedingly elegant and exceedingly polished. Christ is merely another Emperor, and a minor Emperor at that—and the angels are his courtiers.

What would be called side parts or character parts on the stage, are here supplied by mosaics of biblical figures, flanking the two star turns. There are Moses, Abraham and Isaac, mountains, and a lot of sheep. They are done in a different style, with more naïveté, rather like modern strip cartoons, with flags curling above their heads with their names written on them, all neatly labelled so that there shall be no misunderstanding.

I return to the Emperor and his court. How urbane it all is, how sophisticated, how truly grown-up. There is not a breath of divinity anywhere.

I do another round. It is not a church. It might have been the Ritz of the West Roman Empire, or the sixth-century Harrods.

I emerge from the golden shower-bath and step into the garden which lies at the back of the basilica.

According to my guide-book, I should find in the garden the mausoleum of the Empress Galla Placidia. It is named thus for purely negative reasons, because Galla Placidia was not buried here. Well, there is something in the garden. A little house of gray brick, old, though certainly not ancient-looking. Judging by its style and size it might be a public convenience.

There is only one entrance, though. The doorway is covered with a yellow curtain. I step inside and remain standing in complete darkness. That's a damn silly way of showing a mausoleum, I must say. But, good God, a fire must have broken out somewhere, outside. If only the guard had a look what's burning, instead of lounging by the door.

The fire is all around me. I can see it glowing behind the windows. But, really, I say to myself, if there are windows, why is the place so dark? It does not make sense. Actually, the place is not so very dark. I can see quite well by now, my eyes have become used to the darkness. And the windows do not show a fire somewhere outside, it is they themselves that are on fire. An instant later I see that they are not windows the way we know them, but slabs of flame-coloured translucent stone.

The burning windows stand as a reminder of the restless world I have left behind me, while, by now, the room has risen to a life which is not of this world, with every gilt star on the crossed-vaulted night-blue ceiling, with every leaf on the apple-boughs which frame the panels, with every couple of doves feeding from a communal bowl, with every couple of saints seated above the doves and beneath the boughs.

All this is done in mosaics too, but a century earlier than those of San Vitale. In feeling it is as mystical as San Vitale is wordly.

In technique of presentation, in sheer showmanship, it is of a subtlety which is breath-taking.

The deliberate creation of darkness is calculated to fill the beholder at first with the feeling of being lost. Then, gradually, the stars appear on the sky, the leaves and apples grow out of the night, and the saints move forward like a revelation which appears only when one is ready for it, and one is seized with a foreshadowing of that remembrance which will come when the soul awakens from its sleep.

In the afternoon, while drinking coffee in the square, I find myself in the company of the Tired Ones. This is my own name for them.

Although I have been in Italy many times, I have never been part of Italian life. But there is a pimple on the face of Italian life which I know well. And this pimple is the company of the Tired Ones.

In every provincial town they form a group, and their headquarters are in the most elegant café, in the main square.

They are men of about thirty to forty years old and bachelors, all of them. They are wealthy. They own factories and big estates. Most of them hold a university degree and make no use of it. They do not work. They have no intention of getting married. They are tired of life.

When war broke out they joined up with pleasure, not because they were patriotic but because it was something new. Most of them fought well, often heroically. And as soon as the war was over they returned to their small towns and were tired once more. They own huge and powerful cars, often racing cars. If someone should ask them was sort of car they have, they would answer wearily: "Oh, I've got an Alfetto." 'Alfetto' is a contemptuous diminutive of 'Alfa Romeo'.

Although they have a good appreciation of art when it comes their way, they are too tired to look at it. Their one remaining pleasure is the chasing of women and, because they have already explore all the women which it is possible to explore, they turn to foreigners to relieve their boredom.

In their quest for foreign women they are different from the ordinary Italian. To him, the foreign woman is a make-do, time saving, and an easy way out. To the Tired Ones she is a necessity because she is to him the only source of excitement.